His borrowed book is returned to the library scant days after being checked out; Wolf lived and breathed it with a voraciousness only matched by actual appetite. (And he scratched together enough cash to visit MacKenzie's diner and go whole hog on the menu, satiety being the watchword, so all hungers could ebb away barring the one which sat high in Wolf's heart.) There was an ethereal kind of glow about that book, those words, the cover splayed across his bent knees and pages held between his fingertips like threads, flower stems, veins, a (particular) woman's wrist. Wolf finished reading, closed Joss's book, rested his forehead on its cover with a sigh so deep it seemed to come from his toes and work its way up. Then he took it to its right and proper home.
But only after eyeballing the card full of names who'd checked it out previously -- J. Makepeace, sitting there clean and dreamy and clear as glass -- then hunting down a stub of pencil. What he writes into the margins of page 74 is traced out with a light touch, yet the words are stark despite Wolf's efforts. He doesn't know if Joss will see them, though suspects with her it's less a question of "if" and more a matter of "when".
Stories are secrets, don't you think? I was never a Scout, but I am the wild man of Borneo. There once was a man who wasn't a man. Not a wo-man, either, but a no-man.